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IF TAYLOR WERE A BUTTERFLY Ashley Oswald
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showed the dimples on his round, wind-burned cheeks.
They started walking down the other side of the hill. James sat down and tried to slide down it but it didn’t work and when he got up his brother was laughing: the butt of his jeans was dark and soaked.
Andrew pointed and giggled. “Stupid,” he said.
James smiled to himself and wiped what snow he could off the seat of his pants. The backs of his legs were cold and wet. They walked on and the hill slowly leveled out and the trees started to grow closer together and soon they were back in thicker darker woods like the ones behind their house that they had set off in. They couldn’t hear the wind anymore and this made their footsteps seem a lot louder, especially now that there were twigs and branches hidden beneath the snow. Sometimes they would step on one and it would crack like a gunshot and freeze both boys in their tracks and James would turn around and whisper:
“You see? That is why we never find anything.”
They walked past heavy, massive oaks and bright green holly bushes with little red berries that stood out against the whiteness of the snow. Now and then they would pass a birch with the bark peeling off like a door opening and each boy knew this was good to start a fire with because it was what their father always sent them out to collect whenever they couldn’t get newspaper or gasoline. He had taught them to break it in half to see if it was damp or dry in the middle and any good for catching a flame. They wanted him to teach them more—to teach them how to hunt ducks like he used to with the shotgun in the locked case in the cellar—but he couldn’t because he couldn’t see.
James could just barely remember when his father still had his sight and would leave the house and go to work and take him places, but he couldn’t remember the accident at the factory or the days after it at all. Andrew couldn’t remember his father being anything but blind and embarrassed, although sometimes, usually if they were alone and didn’t know what to say to each other, his dad would ask him if he remembered a certain vacation and Andrew would always say yes even though the answer was always no. And once or twice a year, especially on their birthdays when their mother said he got to feeling sorry for himself, their father would tell them to go stand in front of a mirror and tell him exactly what they saw.
Each boy wondered if he would be the one to get the bird gun.
When the boys had been given the air rifles their father had joked that his shotgun would go to the first of them to come home with something big enough for dinner. He told them he had a Red Ryder model just like theirs when he was a boy. They never break, he had said, but then again, they never hit anything either.
They walked on further through the woods and still saw nothing except at one point they found some rabbit tracks that they followed until they seemed to disappear. They came to the creek where they used to try to catch minnows with their hands when they were little and found a narrow part where they could cross. Here the water ran deep and fast and the surface was
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not frozen. James jumped across first and stood ready to help his brother but Andrew took a running start and got across just fine.
They had now gone further than they had the other day. Neither was particularly hungry but they didn’t feel like walking anymore so they decided to stop for lunch. They found a tree that the storm must have felled and sat down on it next to each other, facing opposite directions. Each boy reached inside their jacket and pulled out a strawberry jelly sandwich in a plastic bag that their mother had made for them. James took the sandwich out of the bag and laid it on his knee. He scooped a handful of snow off the log, put the snow in the bag, and twisted and tied it shut. He put it back inside his jacket where the sandwich had been and told his brother to do the same.
“I know,” said Andrew. He bent down, picked up a clump of snow between his feet, and put the snow in the bag. He twisted and tied the bag shut and put it in his coat pocket like his brother had. It felt cold through his shirt and he hoped it wouldn’t leak as it melted.
They sat there eating in silence. The bread stuck to the roofs of their mouths and the jelly got on their hands and made them sticky. Andrew reached inside his jacket to check on his water, but it was still snow. The woods were as quiet and as still as anything can be.
“James?” he said.
“What?”
Andrew picked up some more snow and rubbed it between his palms to try and get the jelly off. He dried his hands on the front of his jeans and blew into them.
“Do you think Dad ever wishes he had died instead?”
James thought about it and finished the bite of sandwich in his mouth-- it was dry and chewy and hard to get down. “I don’t know,” he said.
“Maybe.”
Andrew dug his feet down into the snow and looked up at the way the sunlight came down through the crook of a tree. “But us, we’re good, right?”
James was silent for a long time. “Yeah Andrew, we are.”
“So what does he want?”
“He wants to see.”
“I would too,” said Andrew, still staring at his feet. “It has to be hard not to see.”
“Yeah,” said James, “it has to be hard,” and he looked at his feet, too.
Neither would ever forget that moment as long as they would live—there, sit- ting next to each other in the still woods, they each felt entirely alone.
They sat there like that and the shadows from the trees made the white snow seem grey where it didn’t sparkle in the sunlight. The wind sighed and whistled on the air and some snow shifted and fell from a tree. Andrew licked the jelly off his fingers and wiped them on his pants again.
Then he saw the turkey.
It was walking into a small clearing no more than twenty yards in front of him, strutting one foot forward at a time and bobbing its blue head